I am in the process of trying out PyCharm, and have moved my project into it. I am documenting with the above (see subject) configuration. I moved it into PyCharm, and now am trying to build the documentation within PyCharm. While this works perfectly fine when run on the command line, when trying to build from inside PyCharm I always get some encoding error the first time it encounters a non-ASCII character in a docstring of a Python file, while it perfectly well works with non-ASCII chars in the .rst files themselves. I've even changed the encoding manually in the preferences of PyCharm (File Encodings) so that all .py files are set up as UTF-8, but to no avail. Is there any reason why PyCharm has some encoding error when building Sphinx 1.1pre documentation for Python 3(.1) when a source code file's docstring I include with autodoc contains non-ASCII characters?

At least on my machine, I can reproduce this error always: create a new project and set up Sphinx. Create a Python source-code file and put a non-ASCII character into the docstring of a dummy function inside it. Include the docstring with autodoc, e.g., in the default index.rst:

.. automodule:: test

:members:

Now I alwyas get, for my Sphinx builds, the following output in the PyCharm console:

Might be the case, yes. If there is anything more I can do to help, let me know. I don't see how, but maybe I can try to "smuggle" the envvar you mention into the run of sphinx-build in PyCharm somehow and see if that would fix the issue? I don't need a work-around right now, as I can fall back to the terminal for building documentation that has the described properties - but I'll definitely look forward to a fix! And, thanks for your fast response!